DISCUSSION

PRESIDENT J. F. MILLSPAUGH, State Normal School, Winona, Minn.- I am interested in this very attractive movement. My attitude, however, is one of questioning. The reader of the paper has fallen into the danger of presenting extremes; he has given a view of the very best in one system and the very poorest in the other.

The many excellencies in the system presented may come from good supervision and a strong teaching force. They may be due in large part to the spirit of the teachers and to their desire to contribute to the welfare of the children. The presentation just made is strong because it does not seek to destroy the present class system, but to supplement it. I think the scheme, however, not the wisest that could be devised. It proposes that the amount of individual instruction should be equal in amount to class instruction. There is danger of loss here, danger that the teacher will give instruction when it is not needed. One of the evils of our public-school system is that our pupils are overtaught. There is so much of development of topics, so much of explanation, that pupils are weakened. What is most needed by pupils is habituation to industry—a disposition to overcome difficulty. Children should not fall into the habit of neglecting even difficult duty, nor be deprived of those experiences which put iron into the blood. If instruction is given where it is not needed, it is vicious in its tendency.

Another objection to the system proposed is that special buildings must be constructed for this purpose. Few towns have buildings with rooms fit for this scheme.

I believe also that that is a most fortunate district which finds teachers of such temperament that two can be placed in the same room without incurring some danger of friction. From these and other considerations it would seem that some modification of the plan would be advisable. If, for example, a small number of pupils of the same grade were placed under one teacher, she could alternate class instruction and individual instruction, with the result that each would reinforce and not subvert the other.

The methods and the system set forth in the paper have much in them to admire. It is a misfortune that many of the attempts to remedy evils in the public-school systems have taken the form of attacks. Mr. Kennedy has been wise in refraining from such an attitude.

President G. STANLEY HALL of Clark University. This is the most important question that has been discussed at this session, and the most important of the questions now before the educational public. I have recently read the manuscript of a new book by Superintendent Search, of Holyoke, Mass., in which he sets forth his views on individual instruction, with which you are somewhat familiar. Years of experience have seasoned the views of Mr. Search, and his present discussion is not without merit. It is utterly impossible to interest anybody in the feasibility of that scheme who is interested in the mechanics of our school system. Our mechanism is well-nigh perfect, and many give much time to still further perfecting it. We have reached a standpoint in our knowledge of the child where we can say that a change in the mechanics of our schools must be made to suit his needs.

The question of individuality is a vastly important thing, and we need to realize more the misfortune of retarding the better half of the child. There is an inspiration in this kind of individual work. And inspiration in teaching, a passion for teaching, is a great thing in the teacher.

There is also a financial argument here. A woman guided by her divine instinct is far more effective and worth more money for being so guided. Individual instruction will tend to bring this out in the teacher.

All that amounts to anything in my work is not in lecturing, not in class effects, but when I sit down in my study and talk with a single young man, and there move upon him. Tho I may not know of the fruit, it is a blessed privilege to feel that the seed so planted will grow.

I wish to express a fundamental conviction. Without losing anything that is good, we are to see a radical transformation in our school work thru more service to the individual child. The lines followed by the party of order are good, but no less glorious is the work of those who are guided by the idea of the importance of the individual. There is one compass that always points toward the pole of human destiny, and that is the developing of the individual child up to its highest maturity. When this new time arrives, we shall have less mechanism, but we shall have more of the thing that inspires the teacher who gets into close contact with the individual child. That is the supreme end to which everything else will be subordinated.

SUPERINTENDENT A. K. WHITCOMB, Lowell, Mass.- I have had an experiment in individual instruction forced upon me. The city of Lowell is a mill town, having about twenty-five thousand operatives employed in its factories. There is annually a great influx of foreigners. The laws of Massachusetts provide for the maintenance of evening schools, and Lowell has conducted such schools for a number of years. The present enrollment in our evening schools is 2,000. Many of the attendants are illiterate; some can read and write a little. Individual instruction has been the invariable rule in these schools for a long time until recently. Each teacher was charged with the instruction of ten or fifteen pupils. He would go from pupil to pupil, giving aid where he could; but if the pupil was very illiterate, he was, of course, unable to do anything or to make use of any suggestions, and, being tired from his day's work, would put his head down on the desk and go to sleep.

When I began to investigate the instruction there I proposed that, if the teachers would teach two pupils at once, they would get around twice as fast. The teachers answered that no sort of classification was possible. However, an attempt at classification was made. Pupils who could work together were put together. The result is that the instruction in the evening schools of Lowell has been entirely changed. No one will be found asleep there now, but interest and enthusiasm predominate. There has been a doubling of efficiency by putting pupils together. This is my experience with individualism.

STATE SUPERINTENDENT DELOS FALL of Michigan.-I believe the time has come to abandon the idea that has grown up around the recitation- the teacher on the platform wise, the pupil down below docile. My thought is this: The recitation hour is but a continuation, under better conditions, of the work hour; the platform is banished, the teacher is on a level with the pupils, so that the work that has just preceded the recitation shall be enlarged upon and impressed. The teacher is not to conduct the recitation in the ordinary way, but is to stimulate the pupils to continue their work under better conditions than the preceding hour.

SUPERINTENDENT THOMAS M. BALLIET, Springfield, Mass.- We have passed from the extreme of the county school and the city graded school to get rid of the bad features of individual instruction. We are now engaged in establishing transportation of pupils in order to improve still further in this direction. The two extremes have been presented by Mr. Whitcomb, against which the reader of the paper has made a protest. The need of individual instruction can be reduced by reaching the individual thru class instruction. What we need today is far more oral instruction than we now have. We have done much to check mere talking in the recitation. Instruction now is not oral teaching; it is talking. True, oral teaching consists in having the matter of the lesson arranged methodically in the mind of the teacher, presented in an artistic way, and the child held responsible. It is no use for us to talk about Herbartian methods unless we can get away from book-teaching and this aimless and endless talking.

The fault of the grammar-school and high-school teacher is that he is not master of his material. Our normal schools are responsible here. They are weak in that they turn out a half-dozen primary teachers who are well prepared to one well-prepared grammar

school teacher.

Teachers do not map out a scheme, but follow the text-book instead. With effective oral instruction there will be fewer pupils who will fall behind the class. Oral instruction will put the teacher in closer touch with the child, and a waking up will result. There is no nation on earth where there is so much dependence on books as in America, and no nation where books are so good and so well prepared. We need books, but pupils must be prepared to use them. The way to prepare to use a book is to train pupils to think in the subject which it presents.

I agree with President Hall that we ought to take care of the bright boys and girls. One disadvantage of the public school is that it does not provide for the bright pupils. The whole machinery should not be given over to the benefit of the dull pupils. I would have two kinds of grammar schools-one of them industrial for those pupils whom such a school will most benefit, and one for bright pupils where the study of modern languages is begun, and where pupils are so fitted for the high school that they will save a year or two of time in the high school.

Grammar-school work should be differentiated and district lines should be abolished. This is not undemocratic. Democracy consists, not in taking care of the poorest ones, but in providing for every class - the best as well as the poorest.

Such a plan as I have outlined will solve a number of questions-among others, the introduction of high-school studies into the grammar school. To introduce into all schools what is fitted for only a few schools is always unsatisfactory.

SUPERINTENDent Kennedy closed the discussion. He said, in answer to the question, "What is done with the extra teacher?" "She looks after individual pupils, finds the weak spots and the strong ones, too." In answer to the question, "Would one extra teacher in a six-room building solve the question ?" he said: "I should prefer to have the regular teachers care for the work in a small building." Replying to the objection that two teachers in a room may not get on harmoniously, he said: "The teachers we have co-operate and work together in perfect harmony." Continuing, he said: “Individual instruction is not synonymous with help, but it is the kind of help that brings out the faculties of the pupil." It had been said during the discussion that care should be taken in classification to provide for the bright pupils. Superintendent Kennedy replied: "We are liable to be mistaken as to who the bright pupils are."

DARD

A STANDARD COURSE OF STUDY FOR ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS IN CITIES

SUPERINTENDENT R. G. BOONE, CINCINNATI, O.

The prevalent unrest concerning courses of study is a hopeful sign. Some things have perhaps been settled; a good many others are yet subjects for controversy. What things shall be taught? In what proportion shall each be employed? What is the best, that is, the most profitable, sequence of topics in each for the uses of the school? What are the really essential subjects, and what are the possible ones which may be used at the option of the teacher or the principal of the school? What are the subjects that have highest educational value, and what are chiefly valuable for training or giving a coveted skill? To what extent should the latter be acquired thru working with the former? Can they be so acquired ?

Such are a few of the questions that must occur to everyone interested in arranging or interpreting a course of study. I am asked to submit for the consideration of this body "A Standard Course of Study for Elementary Schools in Cities." Of necessity it must be more or less of a skeleton, an outline, a form to be filled in by the respective schools with some regard to local conditions.

Having in mind what was done by the Committee of Fifteen, and using such familiarity as I have with the school systems of a score of the larger cities, and the contemporary movements of cities of smaller size in a dozen states of the middle and central West, the following theses are submitted as conditioning a "standard course":

THESES

1. Because of (a) the manifoldness of science and the rapid increase in the sum of knowledge, available as instruments for instruction, and (b) the better equipment of teachers, courses of study in the future may safely and wisely be less prescriptive and more suggestive.

This is the first of the three distinctively characteristic points in the recommendations of this paper: that a course of study cannot easily be made, as it might once have been, narrowly prescriptive as inventorying a number of things that must be taught. In the multitude of knowledges, it would seem reasonable to suppose that at any given stage in a class' attainments there will be available a considerable number of approaches to the understanding and skill and interest of its members, which may be selected as the school exercises, and used somewhat indifferently; each serving the teacher's purpose, tho some may be used to better advantage than others.

2. The successive stages in the child's growth, however, and the distribution of work among the several grades in a given system, will probably always require that the sequence of steps in the course should be somewhat rigidly prescribed and adhered to.

This cannot, without danger to children, be made a matter of indifference. With what ideas a course in geography, for example, should begin, and how the successive steps should follow each other, how or by what mental process they articulate, and how the child-order or empirical sequence is or should be modified by the logical relations of the ideas, are questions to which the accepted course of study must be taken as the answer. A course of study, therefore, is primarily an attempt to select from the various threads of interest in the child's environment, that will appeal to him thru his growing years, that one in each branch which is likely to be most effective in his maturing.

This is a crucial test of a course of study- the fact and principles of a right succession of lessons and exercises in any given subject. It is easy to compile a list of topics to be followed thru eight years in history,

or thru three years, to prepare the way for a text-book study of geog. raphy, or a nature-study group, or an elementary-science course for the grammar grades, or a primary course in literature; but to agree upon a sequence in any or several of these, or in others that will occur to you— a sequence whose following by the school will affect individual power, and an integrated interest, and fix the habit of a logical use of experience requires scholarship and right training in both the maker of the course and the teacher who is left to execute it.

3. In all important branches, for each step in the course there should be provided co-ordinate topics of like grade, any one or a minimum number of which may be used as the prescription for the class, at the option of the teacher and the principal.

There would thus be arranged for each grade co-ordinate studies in history for a given class, co-ordinate topics in nature work or science, co-ordinate readings in literature, individual options among constructive exercises, etc.

This I submit as the second distinctively characteristic point in the recommendations of the paper.

In geography, for example, there is the double purpose of teaching: (a) the years of study shall leave the child with a reliable and fairly complete knowledge of the earth as the home of man and the occasion. of his gradual elevation; and (b) it shall serve to cultivate in him a keen and stimulating geographical sense. This is accomplished, not in any one grade, nor by any exhaustive teacher, but by a group of children or by a single child, in their progress thru the years. Something is accomplished each term, and each successive term or year adds to the notion or picture acquired, or clarifies the fine sense of personal inter

But at any given period, for either purpose, different topics and a different succession of exercises upon them may be chosen and profitably pursued. No two rooms having the same grade need follow the same sequence or use the same lessons, tho they may be working upon the same constituent elements of the subject. Indeed, the same teacher may strengthen her work by changing in successive years both the list of lessons and the sequence of exercises in which the lessons are presented.

As the thesis recites, a minimum number of these co-ordinate topics will constitute the prescription in that subject for that grade. Which topic should be chosen of the possible topics for that grade at that time. may be determined by the attainments, the personal and social furnishings of the members of the class; by the abundant or meager equipments of the school; by the qualifications of the teacher; by the local social and recent or current educational biases of the neighborhood, or by the preferences of the principal; or by a composite of all of these influences combined.